Posted
by
CmdrTaco
on Tuesday March 23, 2010 @04:14PM
from the that's-not-gonna-work dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Opera Mini for iPhone was officially submitted to the Apple iPhone App store today. A select few first saw it at Mobile World Congress 2010 in February. Now, the 'fast like a rocket' browser is taking its first big step towards giving users a new way to browse on the iPhone."

Whether accepted or not, Opera has gained a lot of basically free publicity with this. That's what it is about, and good for them.

I am not absolutely sure that Apple will reject it. If I was Apple though, I would make them change the name to, for example, 'Opera Web Viewer', and not allow it to access https pages at all. Then they get to claim user-security and still let this thing in.

I love Opera and all, but I'm not sure I would use it myself. I'll look at it when it's available, no reason to worry until then.

You keep using this word evil but I don't think you know what it means.

Creating a "walled garden" for an app store is _NOT_ evil. Deal with it. In case you hadn't noticed, virtually every store on the planet practices that every day. They don't just stock products because they exist - they only stock products that match their store's motif if they think they can sell it. Sorry. Not evil. Totally, utterly, not evil.

Apple will say that it duplicates existing iPhone functions and will refuse to accept it.

But lets all keep saying Microsoft is evil.

Apple has made that rule clear [...]

They've stated it lots of times as a reason for rejecting things, sure, but often while allowing other things that are just as duplicative of the same core functionality as the the thing rejected with that stated reason.

So, either they are just extremely inconsistent in enforcing the rule, or the "rule" is just an excuse.

I don't think they render the page to a bitmap, but rather preprocess the HTML+CSS to generate a fixed layout, which is much simpler (=faster) for the client to render.But if that is indeed what they're doing, I dunno how they deal with animating elements (which would require the entire layout to be recalculated frame-by-frame).

I really hope Apple rejects it quickly so Opera tosses it up on the jailbroken software distribution channels (Cydia/Rock). All the more stuff to show my friends to get them interested in breaking Apple's chokehold on their hardware.

It's not like I'd refuse to use it if it was on the Apple Store, I'd actually be rather happy if it was for all the people who choose not to jailbreak, but I imagine that Opera is waiting to see if they get Apple's blessing before rolling it out by other means. And I bet that Apple will likely delay their "decision" as long as possible (indefinitely?) until people/media forget about it, then quietly deny it if pushed to a decision.

No it's not... it's not even close, really. You give one of the reasons yourself -- the monopoly thing. But beyond that, MS never prevented 3rd party browsers from running on the system. Even at the height of IE dominance (both in terms of market share and even, IMO for a short time, quality), it was never hard to run other browsers on Windows.

This is entirely different from the iPhone situation, where Apple doesn't just get to decide what you see by default, but can entirely prevent you (without jailbreaking) from running a particular program for no technical reason whatsoever.

Apple doesn't care what a tiny minority of geeks thinks. If they did the iPad would have 2 cameras, 4 media card slots, 5 usb ports, 2 removable batteries, a combo OLED / eInk screen and would run Linux. And it would cost under $300.

I'd give it a try if Apple 'blessed' it (which I doubt they will considering how 'fair' they are) but I don't know if it will ever match the speed of Safari considering they don't have access to the private API's that Apple does (and forbids everyone else from using).

What API's would those be? Safari uses WebKit, just like any other app on the iPhone that wants to serve up web pages.

As far as WebKit goes, what do you suppose it can do that some other rendering engine won't be able to do? It can be written in C, can use OpenGL (as well as things like CoreAnimation)...

So, really, what super-secret APIs are you thinking of here?

Apple keeps APIs private for only two reasons:

1. They aren't finished yet.2. Security/Privacy.

As for the "fairness" of Apple, and whether they'll approve Opera, they probably won't. It's not because (like so many people think) that they don't want the competition, it's because they believe Safari is the best browser out there, and want to keep the iPhone experience fairly consistent in terms of core functionality.

Just to be pedantic, users don't wait until a page is fully loaded before trying to use it, so getting a page to the point where it is displayed and barely usable is more important then having the whole thing loaded.

I'm not a fan of Apple's practices, but it's not mandatory to buy an Apple iPod Touch/iPhone and therefore not mandatory to deal with the restrictions that Apple uses on being the only store in town. To their credit Apple has done enough right obviously to make it seem like they're the only option in town.

Don't let others influence your decision to concede on a stand against a product. If you do not like something enough don't buy it, but more importantly don't take it as in insult. I got a refund on Assassins Creed 2 collectors edition after I found out about the internet connection DRM, and I'll be damned if I put up with it even if everyone on that planet purchases it; it bothers me that much. I have also done this with Square's "The Last Remnant" which requires steam to play a single player game.

This is not "Opera" the Web browser. This is "Opera Mini," which is a feature phone pseudo-browser that makes up for the lack of resources on a feature phone by essentially running the Web browser on a server at Opera, rendering the pages there and sending photos of them back to the user. The problem is, that means you have absolutely no privacy, and absolutely no security. Opera not only knows your history, they know your passwords, they sit in-between you and authenticated servers. Maybe on a feature phone where you have no other choice, it's worth it to give that up. But on a smartphone where you already have an HTML5 browser, it's not a good idea.

Well, let the user choose, you say. If you are technically advanced enough to install Opera Mini on your feature phone, then maybe you also understand what privacy and security you're giving up. Somewhere in the arduous process of installing the app you read a terms of service and were warned about the implications of using the browser. But on iPhone, you only have to know how to click "INSTALL" and users who are accustomed to a private, secure browsing experience will assume that is what they're getting in Opera, not realizing it is "Opera Mini." When users install native apps, they're putting your trust in Apple. iPhone users expect the apps they get at the App Store to be 100% malware free and to be 100% respectful of their privacy and security. The example that is used is the app should not upload your address book. How much worse is it that the app uploads every password you give it, that the app sits between you and your bank, that the app uploads every single URL you give it, sees every single email? Knows your Facebook login, your Gmail login, and so on?

The reason Opera is doing this big "they won't approve it" PR campaign is that Opera knows full well Apple won't approve it because of the privacy and security issues, and they want to make PR hay with the implication that Apple can't compete with Opera. But if they really wanted to put a browser on iPhone, where is "Opera," the desktop-class Web browser? That is what they should be offering users who have OS X in their phone if they offer anything at all. There are dozens of alternative browsers on iPhone. Why isn't one of them "Opera" by now? Why didn't they ship that years ago already? Why would you possibly offer users of a smartphone that has had a desktop-class browser for 3+ years the pseudo-browser from a feature phone? Unless you were being disingenuous from the start.

What's more, Opera says that Opera Mini is the most used mobile Web browser, when that is clearly not true. Apple Safari for iPhone is responsible for the vast majority of mobile Web browsing in every study. Opera says that Opera Mini is the most popular mobile Web browser, on 50 million handsets. But there are more than 50 million iPhones, and Safari for iPhone is also on another 50 million iPods, and now a million iPads have been sold already as well. So their disingenuous behavior extends to every aspect of this PR stunt.

The most foolish part about this is people here saying "evil Apple" when Opera Mini violates the core principles of the Web, and Apple WebKit has brought desktop-class HTML5 browsing to phones, including Nokia, Android, Palm, and soon Blackberry. Get a grip. You ought to be ashamed of your hypocrisy.